Dev Diary #60: Inner Workings

Caption: Luckless Seven is the story of Mark Vesco’s journey from a listless existence to competitive glory. Blending a fast-paced card battle system with conversations and stories that respond to your choices, we offer one of the first card games with a story exciting enough to match it. Ready to play? https://store.steampowered.com/app/433370/Luckless_Seven/ Check out the Demo and Wishlist Today! Trying to make the best of a global pandemic, these last couple weeks gave us some time to reflect on our workflow and the road ahead. We are quite a ways from the initial target date we set for Luckless Seven, but we are still absolutely committed to seeing this through.

Caption: New Mark Portraits in development!

Caption: Old portraits for Mark that will be phased out in time. One drawback to the long development is that earlier parts of the game tend to not reflect the level of quality of the parts we work on today. During playtesting feedback, this gets pointed out. Oftentimes, we end up going back to those sections and bring them up to snuff.

Caption: Help people find their path. Today I wanted to take a quick dive into the inner workings of Deckpoint Studio. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the main person handling the ropes. That person is the developer and lead of Luckless Seven, Jesse Kooner. Given the very long span of Luckless Seven’s development, Jesse has been the only person who has continued to work on the game full time since its inception. We’ve gotten some questions from people over the years on how we’ve managed to keep up game development for so long. The answer is that most of us on the teamwork other jobs that help keep us alive.

Caption: Emerald Casino is the next stage of the card-game Ekosi tournament! Containing over 50 NPCs and every inch is full of detail! This means, of course, that Luckless Seven has experienced all the great positives and stifling negatives of a project with one sole coder. Jesse being the only programmer means that there is always cohesiveness with all the technical aspects of the game. However, this also means that when he gets extremely sick (please stay away coronavirus), it almost always means the personal deadlines we had for that time period have to be moved back. While we can continue to produce music, art, or story, those are frequently not the bottleneck for releasing a new major game build.

Caption: Jesse Kooner, Lead Developer on Luckless Seven. Programmer, Environmental Artist, and Implementer of everything in the game engine. The ultimate result of this is that Jesse has had a hand in every aspect of Luckless Seven, from marketing, website design, game development, and business management. Fortunately for the rest of us, Jesse had developed many of those skills already from previous work experience. Jesse’s time studying business for his MBA program also helped with managing the finances and tax work for the studio.

Caption: Your "friends" just got even more interesting. This wide range of experience has helped him manage the work done by the rest of the team and